Category: inspiration
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If You’re Not Doing Some Things That are Crazy, Then You’re Doing the Wrong Things.
So says Larry Page. There's been a few interviews published with him of late but this Wired one by Steven Levy is one of the best. Lots to take out but I really liked his answer to a question about ambition and big bets: "I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we…
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Marginal and Breakthrough Innovation
I liked this talk from Tim Harford from the Wired conference a while back. He uses some great examples to talk about the requirement for both types of innovation – that which brings incremental gain and continuous improvement over time, and the kind that involves high risk, different thinking, frequent failure but big potential gain.…
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As Many Paths As Possible
Since late November Russell Davies has been doing a splendid job of documenting his Kindle Highlights from the many and diverse books that he has read. One of my favourite quotes came from Kindle book number 34, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway: "You don't make strategy so that there's one path to victory; you make it…
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On Competitive Focus
So much management time in organisations is wasted analysing what the competition are doing. Competitive positioning and strategies are important of-course, but I often think that one of the downsides of an over-enthusiastic focus on responding to what others are doing in your market is that you forget to be awesome yourself. So in that…
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Project Wild Thing
I'm lucky enough to live with some of England's loveliest countryside on my doorstep and my children get out in it every week. But not every child is so fortunate. The distance children roam away from home has shrunk by 90% in 30 years, and according to Natural England, less than 10% of children get to play…
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Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture – The Event
"Remixing is not scary, or depressing. It is empowering" The Firestarters events that I curate for Google are all about inspiration, challenging thinking and provocation and for our latest event on Remix Culture we had that in spades in the form of an excellent talk by writer and film producer Kirby Ferguson. Kirby is the…
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The Difference Between Management and Leadership
'One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” I like to lean toward the latter, and I’m definitely drawn to other people who do the same.' Jeff…
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Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture
"The remix is the very nature of the digital" William Gibson At our last Firestarters event at Google in September we expored the theme of digital storytelling through the lens of three excellent speakers and some great contributions from the audience. Following on nicely from some of the ideas that arose there, our next event…
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Fixing Stuff
John Naughton had a smart post about planned obsolesence, which is far from a new idea, but is something that Apple seem to be very good at (reducing the support, compatability for older but perfectly workable versions of products in order to encourage people to buy the latest one). In response to my tweeting of the…
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Learning by Teaching
There's a bit in Dave Trott's Creative Mischief where he talks about the practice he's adopted over the years of giving classes of students briefs to work on and having them come into the agency in the evenings to present their work to the creative department. As well as being wonderfully useful to the students he…